Torture and it's enablers.
As we finally hear that the Red Cross International Committee have stated that the US is torturing people - which is illegal under both American and international law - and that some members of the US administration might face charges for war crimes, Daniel Larison gets it spot on as to how we arrived at such a place.
The progression of apologists for the state is always more or less the same: to suggest that the government is doing something flatly illegal and immoral is disloyal, and then once it has been proved that the government has been doing something flatly illegal and immoral it is only soft-headed idealists who think that such things are unjustifiable. “We have to be pragmatic!” they tell us. This is where the logic of wanting to “get things done” takes you.I had long and boring discussions on here with people who opposed torture "if it is against American law" and yet found themselves expressing puzzlement as to whether or not waterboarding constituted torture "according to American law" - as, obviously, international law is an anathema to such people.
These people seem to see their only function in life as to blindly defend every single action Bush takes - whether it be legal or otherwise - and to demand that any accusation against Bush and his cohorts be backed by 100% proof, a proof which was almost impossible to obtain because Bush refused to ever allow any examination of what he was actually up to.
As Larison points out, the irony here is that Bush had very little evidence - far less than the 100% Bush's defenders were demanding that we supply - for people that they were holding in Guantanamo Bay and possibly torturing. And worse, his administration had been told that many of the people they were keeping there had no connection to terrorism.
I don't expect the fact that they have been proven 100% wrong will change such people. They have no consciences, which is why they put themselves through such linguistic gymnastics in defence of the indefensible. Which is why they expressed such puzzlement over whether or not drowning people was actually a form of torture. Indeed, I can hear them even now dismissing the International Red Cross as an anti-American, pro-terrorist, group of windbags.After a study involving dozens of detainees, the analyst came up with an answer: A large fraction of them “had no connection with terrorism whatsoever,” Mayer writes, citing officials familiar with the report. Many were essentially bystanders who had been swept up in dragnets or turned over to the U.S. military by bounty hunters. Previous published reports have described the CIA analyst’s visit but have not provided details of its findings.
According to Mayer, the analyst estimated that a full third of the camp’s detainees were there by mistake. When told of those findings, the top military commander at Guantanamo at the time, Major Gen. Michael Dunlavey, not only agreed with the assessment but suggested that an even higher percentage of detentions — up to half — were in error.
But it was those people, right wing bloggers and right wing windbags, who enabled Bush to take America's reputation through the mud; and they did so because they saw any form of dissent as treachery.
Larison again:
The entire system was justified according to the assumption that the government never makes mistakes and always acts in good faith, when we know that the opposite is typically the case.I am reminded, again, of that great quote from Mark Twain:
Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.The right wing loons demanded that Bush's government be supported even as it looked ever more likely that it was acting illegally; indeed, they questioned the very patriotism of anyone who even suspected what Bush was doing.
The blood is on their hands as much as it is on Bush's. He would never have got away with it without them.
Click title for Larison's excellent article.
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